Lexington, Mass. – March 23, 2010 – Ipswitch, Inc., the developer of the WhatsUp Gold suite of innovative IT management solutions, today announced the availability of WhatsVirtual, a plug-in module that delivers accurate and up-to-date availability and performance visibility into VMware®-based virtual server infrastructures. WhatsVirtual natively integrates with the VMware vSphere API and discovers, maps, monitors and manages ESX and ESXi hosts and their associated virtual machines from a single console. While virtualized environments reduce the overall cost of ownership, improve reliability and enhance the flexibility of IT architectures, they also make the monitoring and management of data centers more complex. Systems and datacenter managers must frequently contend with using different management tools for managing physical and virtual infrastructure, leading to fragmented views of network availability and delaying the time to problem resolution. Further, traditional monitoring approaches, like SNMP and WMI, are unable to address with the dynamic creation, breakdown and allocation of virtual capacities. Consequently, virtualization vendors like VMware have moved to publish management information through their own APIs in order to provide an accurate representation of real-time network utilization. “WhatsVirtual makes IT management simple by enabling single console monitoring for all physical and virtual servers,” said Kevin Gillis, VP of product management, Ipswitch, Inc.’s Network Management Division. “With WhatsVirtual’s complete integration into the WhatsUp Gold platform, network and systems managers can access a consolidated view of every aspect of the datacenter. This makes for the powerful combination of affordable and reliable functionality and the value that customers have come to expect from WhatsUp Gold solutions,” Gillis said. WhatsVirtual provides configurable reporting and alerting to ensure that real-time status and immediate notification of failures and performance issues result in speedy isolation and resolution. It supports intuitive drill downs from ESX/ESXi host system representations into each virtual machine, and further into component resources to provide administrators support for VMware actions and management tasks. These tasks can be scheduled for recurring action, as well as performed on-demand directly from the WhatsUp Gold Alert Center. "Virtualization has become mainstream in the past year, and many customers have deployed thousands of virtual server environments across their enterprises. With WhatsVirtual, we are ensuring that every company interested in, considering or evaluating server virtualization for the first time has access to industry-leading virtualization management technology and backbone SNMP based devices in one solution," said Ennio Carboni, president, Ipswitch, Inc.’s Network Management Division. "WhatsUp Gold and WhatsVirtual make it easy and compelling for companies new to virtualization to take the first step toward enterprise-wide virtual infrastructure."

WhatsVirtual Features

Support for VMware ESX/ESXi monitoring, including:

New VMware Discovery Role and Discovery Attributes

New VMware Workspaces Reports:

Virtual Host

Virtual Host List

New VMware Performance Monitors

Virtual Machine CPU

VMware Host CPU

Virtual Machine Disk

VMware Disk

Virtual Machine Memory

VMware Memory

Virtual Machine Interface

VMware Interface

New VM Mapping

New VMware Credential Type for VMware hosts

New VMware Action Type

Alert Center Thresholds for VMware

Pricing and Availability

WhatsUp Gold WhatsVirtual is immediately available starting at $1,495 USD (MSRP) and is licensed for an unlimited number of monitors. WhatsUp Gold v14.2 is required to run WhatsVirtual. A free trial of WhatsVirtual is also immediately available for download from the WhatsUp Gold website.

About The Network Management Division of Ipswitch, Inc.

The Network Management Division of Ipswitch, Inc. is the developer of the WhatsUp Gold suite of innovative IT Management software. WhatsUp Gold delivers comprehensive network, system, application and event log monitoring and management solutions for small and medium businesses and enterprises. Built on a modular, yet integrated architecture - the affordable and easy-to-use solutions scale with the size and complexity of any physical or virtual IT infrastructure. From a single console, WhatsUp Gold supports standard IT management tasks including automated discovery, mapping, real-time monitoring, alerting, troubleshooting and reporting. Over 100,000 networks worldwide use WhatsUp Gold solutions to assure the availability, health and security of their critical business infrastructure today. Ipswitch, Inc.’s Network Management Division recently added to its product line complete, easy-to-use solutions for Windows Security Event Management (SEM) and Log Management for small businesses and enterprise-level organizations suite with the acquisition of Dorian Software Creations, Inc. WhatsUp Gold was named Network Management Product of 2010 by Network Computing Magazine and earned the Network Products Guide 2010 Product Innovation Award in Network Management. To learn more about WhatsUp Gold – the best value in IT Management software, download a free trial or to make a purchase, please visit: http://www.whatsupgold.com/products/download/